Arriving at work in the cool, dark hours of pre-dawn, greenskeepers go about their business of nurturing their golf course rather anonymously, generally invisible to most golfers -- until your ball comes to rest in a divot or on hard pan, or you miss a putt and need a quick excuse. And then, in the time-honored tradition, you do what golfers have been doing since the first Scotsman decided there had to be a better way of keeping the greens mowed than wandering herds of hungry sheep and decided to give it a go himself: Blame it on the greenskeeper!
In the mid-'90s, alas, the term greenskeeper is about as au courrant as hickory shafts. The preferred term is "superintendent." The golf course superintendent has a "maintenance staff." But while they, like the golfers they serve, use increasingly high-tech equipment, their work, like the game, remains traditional and elemental. They are still the keepers of the greens.
In Hawaii, no greenskeeper has a bigger job than Short Honma. As director of resort maintenance at Kapalua on the island of Maui, he is in charge of three very different golf courses -- the Bay, the Village and the Plantation, which hosts one of just two PGA Tour events played in Hawaii, the Lincoln-Mercury Kapalua International in November.
Kapalua is the first Hawaii resort to offer 54 holes. So it's a tribute to Short and his staff that their three golf courses receive thousands of compliments by everyone from high-handicappers to touring pros to fellow superintendents. But Short doesn't let compliments go to his head.
"When a golfer shoots a good score, he thinks the course was in great shape," Short says. "I know, I'm a golfer. But the same guy, he shoots a bad score and its because the course is terrible, the greens too grainy, the fairways too thin. I don't worry too much about compliments or criticism. I know what kind of job I'm doing."
About the only thing that Short ever let go to his head was a cabbage. It had been chucked in his direction by his father, Tsunesaku, because young Short wasn't paying proper attention to his work on the family cabbage farm at Volcano on the Island of Hawaii.
Short attributes much of his success in life to that cabbage.
"I thought I was working hard, but I guess I wasn't," recalls Short, whose given name is Sho. "Then there was this cabbage flying in the air, out of nowhere, hitting me smack in the back of the head. And there was my dad giving me the stink eye. He was a man of few words. I knew what he meant: Back to work."
It gave a whole new meaning to the term "head cabbage."
Like his father, Short has passed along the lesson of hard work to four successful children. He also passed along a love of working with the land to two of his sons, Daniel and Michael, who are golf course superintendents at Makena and Turtle Bay respectively. And Short did it without using roughage as a projectile.
Besides that cabbage, Short says "getting into the golf maintenance profession was the best thing that happened to my family and me."
It wouldn't have happened without some serious intervention by forces as diverse as Madame Pele, the volcano goddess of Hawaii, and Uncle Sam.
Following in his father's footsteps, Short started farming after graduating from Hilo High School. On a farm adjacent to the Volcano Golf & Country Club, he grew vegetables and then sold the produce out of the back of his truck. At the age of 23, he married Miyoko Kusumoto, who worked in the Volcano Hongo Store and the Fern Haven Restaurant in Volcano.
It must have been true love because, as Short tells it, "we lived under a tarp in an abandoned potato shed for eight years. Without running water, or hot water, or toilet, we suffered through the cold and wet for years. We took baths in a galvanized tub out in the open."
Money was scarce, but Short got to play golf almost daily.
"When they needed farm equipment to do a certain job, I provided it," he recalls. "And they provided me with free golf. I got my handicap down to a four."
As the family grew, so did the farming business. They moved into a real home. And then in 1959, Pele's fire erupted at Kilauea Iki. The volcano spewed hot cinders and filled with air with poisonous sulphur fumes that "destroyed our crops in succession. Subsequent eruptions at Halemaumau Crater in the `60s destroyed all hopes of ever regaining our lost revenues over several years. We gave up farming in 1969 and I went to work as a bowling alley attendant at the Kilauea Military Camp."
The next year, with the Vietnam War still raging, Short's eldest son, Michael, joined the Air Force. Michael had been working at the Volcano course and his job went to Short. He was promoted to crew chief six months later and has been in the golf business ever since.
In 1972, when C. Brewer & Co. began work on what would become the SeaMountain development at Punalu`u on the Ka`u Coast of the Island of Hawaii, they asked Short to be the superintendent of Arthur Jack Snyder's 18-hole golf course. Short was involved with golf course construction superintendent George Biersdorf in building the course across solid black lava, just the second time it had been attempted in Hawaii. (Mauna Kea was the ground-breaker, so to speak.) It was to be the first installment of what was proposed as a 72-hole golf resort.
The next year, Biersdorf was also instrumental in Short's move to Kapalua, although that name and the now famous pineapple butterfly logo were still a couple of years away.
"George told me about an interesting situation on Maui, an operation called Honolua Plantation. George recommended that I go check it out first-hand. Well, the only other time I'd been off the Island of Hawaii was for two and a half months during high school when I worked one summer on the plantation at Kunia (Oahu). To this day, I still haven't been to the Mainland or Japan. Why should I travel? I like it here."
Colin Cameron, the late Kapalua founder, visited Short at SeaMountain in 1974, rode around the course and talked about growing grass on Maui. He offered the job as course superintendent for the Bay Course, designed by Arnold Palmer. In 1974, Short moved his family to Maui, "although I had absolutely no knowledge of the kind of golf course or how it was to be operated, except that Mr. Cameron said that we were to build and maintain the best on Maui and the best in the state of Hawaii."
Short was so demanding that "in the first year, we probably went through 100 employees. There was high turnover because of our high standard of operation that was required to achieve our goals."
Twenty years later, it's tough to find a course anywhere that is in better condition than Kapalua's trio.
As his responsibilities have expanded to include the entire Kapalua resort, Short has gradually turned over superintendent roles to others -- Ian Swezey at the Village in 1992, Andy Taira at the Bay in 1993 and Kent Nishijima at the Plantation since construction began in 1989. Each of them confers with Short on a daily basis. And he checks the courses personally -- as a golfer. "Unlike a lot of golf course superintendents, I play golf," he says. "That's the only way to really see a golf course. You see things standing over a putt that you don't see driving by in a truck."
And true to instruction from Colin Cameron, Short did make Kapalua number one in another area. At his urging, the Bay Course last year became the first in Hawaii -- and just the second in the United States -- to be certified by the Audubon Society of New York's Cooperative Sanctuary Program. To be certified, courses must meet criteria that include watershed enhancement, creating animal habitat, integrated pest management and preserving and planting native plant species.
"I was reading in one of the golf magazines about chemical use by golf courses," Short says. "And then I heard about the Audubon program. So I contacted them and asked them to send us some information."
The Bay Course is becoming a haven for native Hawaiian plants, many of which are threatened species. That helps explain why over 20 different bird species have been sighted on the course.
The Plantation and Village Courses have received preliminary certification by the New York Audubon Society and expect full certification this year. At the Village Course, 16 acres have been returned to a natural state, providing critical habitat for birds and animals. At the Plantation, wild native grasses are part of the design.
Short offers two salient statistics: Chemical use on his courses has been cut by 50 percent and the number of birds that wildlife biologists have surveyed has doubled.
"Golf courses can and should take the lead in protecting the wildlife that call these courses home," says Shorta. "Caring for our courses is secondary to our need to protect those who inhabit them. It's not only our desire to preserve the environment, it's our responsibility."
And if it's good for the birds, it has to be good for birdie-seeking golfers, too.
Farming, he believes, provided the best kind of practical training for a greenskeeper.
"You're raising different things, grass and flowers and trees instead of vegetables, but it's basically the same work," says Short. "You do everything you can to make things grow healthy."
Back to Reading Room Home page